I am not much of a traveller, as I said for a couple of times earlier. Partly because I am too lazy to take a trip. I was a bit lazy for this trip as well, but once you promise people, you can’t really cancel things. So, we went on a trip to Amasya with Lisa (now in Canada) and Laura (she’s still in Ankara! – hi Laura!!). This video is a bit old – poor video, waited for like 3 months before it got published. I have my reasons, if you ask me, maybe.

Anyway, this video is shot at a place in Amasya. My searches shows that this place used to be a mental institution (a bimarhane in old Turkish, apparently) back in the day. Now it serves as a small conservatory. These people get together and make music together occasionally – we were lucky to listen to them and have some tea in this lovely building that has memory.

This is the first video that I shot using a tripod. Wanted to post this because of the following random quotes from Emerson‘s essay called Nature.

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. Note But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime.

[…] When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. Note It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet.

[…] To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Note Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food.

[FYI: The video is in Turkish] I and Firat – a friend from grad school – is reading the news on the newspaper in a mocking way. News are written very badly if you pay attention and they are quite funny if you have that tendency or unless you are someone who takes things really seriously. This is sort of how our speech goes with Firat, with this kind of stream of consciousness.

We shot this in our office; because the ceiling is quite high and the office is quite empty, there is some echo in the sound. After having some problems with widescreen/16:9 encoding, I solved the issues by playing with the settings manually, and with a couple of editing I came up with this.

This is Zazu. He is a couple of weeks old and was found by Irem, a friend of mine from grad school. The story of Zazu is interesting: When Irem came back home, her dog Duduk was barking to an old stove (that uses coal) that has been in her house’s entrance-ish garden. She took Duduk home thinking that the cat will leave when it feels safe. But Duduk wasn’t really comfortable and kept barking late at night. So she decided to have a look, got everything in the stove out in 2 AM and found this little kitty covered with ashes – too much of them, our hands kept becoming black whenever we petted the poor kitty. She took him to a vet in the morning and brought it to her office in the university to find him a home. Zazu was either traumatized or was too tired and sleepless – he didn’t do much all day. But our instructor, Zafer Aracagok, who took him home, said Zazu even started to discover the house in his first hours there – after a long day of moving here and there.

We all loved Zazu. This is his first video recordings shot at Uptown Bistro on Bilkent University campus.

This is my first video post and my first attempt in videoblogging. The video quality isn’t really good due to my lack of knowledge of video compression and all that (edit: bitrate is increased now). Also, although I tried every guideline I’d found, I couldn’t really make it deinterlaced (fixed now). The editing isn’t superb but I think this is not bad for a first timer (yes, this is my very first video editing, so treat me fairly :) ). So, what do you think? About the cat? About the video?